Study Says that Hobbits of Flores Island Are Not Homo Sapiens

The question about the origins of Homo floresiensis has been one of the most important problems of modern science since 2003, when a team of Australian and Indonesian researchers excavated some 18,000 year-old bones. Now, scientists believe they have discovered the truth about the beings fondly called “Hobbits.”

The bones of Homo floresiensis were discovered during an excavation of a limestone cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores. The aim of the work was to find evidence of the original human migration of Homo sapiens from Asia to Australia. The remains found were of a woman whose skull was less than one-third the size of Homo sapiens. Thus, the researchers began to look for clues to decide if the owner of the skull was a modern human or a different species. According to Discovery News, the mystery may now be solved.

French scientists, connected with France's Natural History Museum and Paris-Descartes University, conducted research regarding the origins of the being dubbed “'Hobbit.” Antoine Balzeau, a scientist, and Phillipe Charlier, a palaeontologist specialized in solving ancient medical mysteries, secured high-resolution images recently generated in Japan to compute layers of bone thickness in the Hobbit skull. To be more precise, they re-examined the remains of Liang Bua 1, which are about 15,000 years old and the most intact of nine known specimens. Their results have been published in the Journal of Human Evolution.